«The Englishman» by J. M. R. Lenz as an artistic reflection of the crisis in a «Sturm und Drang» movement

Gladilin Nikita Valer'evich ORCID: 0009-0006-7676-3663 Doctor of Philology Associate Professor; Department of Foreign Languages; Gorky Literary Institute 123104, Russia, Moscow, blvd. Tverskaya street, 25 nikitagl@inbox.ru Other publications by this author

The work of the outstanding German writer Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), one of the luminaries of the Storm and Onslaught movement, has not been sufficiently studied by Soviet and Russian literary studies. Lenz's prose and poetic texts are still practically outside the scope of consideration, and the appeal to his dramaturgy is limited to three major plays — "The Tutor", "Soldiers" and "The New Menosa", as well as translations and alterations of Plautus' comedies. Meanwhile, Lenz created a large number of less voluminous plays and dramatic fragments, without the analysis of which the logic of his individual development as a writer and thinker is not completely clear, and his contribution to the aesthetic and ideological concept of "Storm and Onslaught" is not fully understood.

This study is chronologically devoted to one of Lenz's last dramas, "The Englishman" ("Der Engländer", 1775/76, ed. 1777), in which the author reflected and summarized many ideological and thematic constants of his work. In particular, we will be interested in the specifics of the "Storm and Onslaught" clearly manifested in this work, as well as the reflection of Lenz's personal hardships in the context of the general problems characteristic of the "stormy geniuses" — Sturmers.

Let's take into account that the reputation of the "Englishman" in the literary tradition is very unenviable. Thus, the author of the most complete, although written more than 120 years ago, domestic research on the life and work of Lenz, M. N. Rozanov, qualified "The Englishman" as a weak work of an unhealthy, broken spirit: "It is too imprinted with a pathological character to claim any artistic significance. Distant thuds can already be felt here, foreshadowing the onset of that inexorable thunderstorm that stole Lenz's consciousness" ^{[1, p. 382]}. However, in our opinion, the last of the plays written during the most fruitful period of the writer's life in Strasbourg is a natural link both in his individual creative biography and in the evolution of the entire "Storm and Onslaught" movement.

By the time he was working on The Englishman, the situation of Lenz, who was then living in Strasbourg, had become extremely difficult. His bosom friend, like-minded person and patron Goethe finally decided to serve at the court of the Duke of Weimar and had already begun a decisive departure from the "Storm and Onslaught" movement, which, in fact, he led. A series of failures plagued Lenz in his personal life. His financial situation became unbearable, supported only by rare private lessons; moreover, he realized that the only literary work he earned brought practically no income. In letters from the end of 1775 and the beginning of 1776, Lenz incessantly laments his bitter fate: to the main theorist of the "Storm and Onslaught" Herder, he writes: "The poet is the most unhappy being under the sun" ^{[2, Bd. 3, S. 352]}, to Goethe's friend I. G. Merk — "I am as poor as a church mouse" ^{[2, Bd. 3, S. 406]}, and in the interval between these two complaints he utters a real cry of the soul in a letter to the publisher G. H. Boye: "Forgive me for my vehemence, I am now mired in the most real need. My debts are significant by my standards, and if I do not find a quick way out of the situation, I am afraid that in a place where my reputation has so far brought me all means of livelihood, I will forever and irrevocably be subjected to prostitution" ^{[2, Bd. 3, S. 358]}. At that time, Lenz was eager to radically change his life, planned long trips to Italy and England, counting on someone else's financial help, but at the last moment his benefactors refused him. As a result, in the spring of 1776, he went to much closer Weimar to "Goethe's friend", where he was met with the greatest disappointment of his entire life, and Italy and England became the scenery of a small but very important play for him.

The genre designation given to the "Englishman" by its author is very curious — it is not a "drama", not a "tragedy", not a "comedy". Lenz was a master of the synthetic genre of tragicomedy; in his three full-length plays, acute social and interpersonal conflicts coexist with humor, satire and convex typing. But "The Englishman" is completely subtitled "dramatic fantasy" ("eine dramatische Phantasterei"), thereby claiming genre originality, unconventionality. The term "fantasy" is borrowed from the dictionary of musicians and means "a genre of instrumental (occasionally vocal) music, the individual features of which are expressed in a deviation from the usual norms of construction for its time, less often in an unusual figurative filling of the traditions of [ionic] compositions of [ionic] scheme" ^{[3, p. 767]}. Among Lenz's contemporaries, as an author of musical fantasies, K. F. E. Bach stood out in particular, striving for freedom of compositional expression, not constrained by the framework of the usual canons. The stage works of the Sturmers also have a free, "Shakespearean" structure. The reference for them is Goethe's "Getz von Berlichingen", where, contrary to the precepts of the classicists, side effects are observed along with the main storyline, the action covers a long time period and is played out in more than 50 different places. Similarly, the author of The Englishman, as in his previous dramas, does not want to obey the classical Aristotelian rules. However, in the absence of unity of place and time, this time the unity of action is observed: it revolves exclusively around the central character and his passion. But at the same time, "The Englishman" is small in volume, and the division into acts is parodic in nature (almost each of them consists of only one scene, ironically called the "first", with the exception of the second, which encompasses two scenes), and the share of the final act in the overall structure of the play exceeds 40%. It is obvious that Lenz deliberately did not strive to observe structural proportions, following the free flow of his imagination and striving to express in a free form everything that hurt him.

It is not for nothing that foreign researchers note in the "Englishman" a pronounced autobiographical beginning. As you know, Lenz once disobeyed his authoritarian father, not wanting to follow in his footsteps and serve as a pastor in his native Livonia; instead, he went to the other side of Europe, to Strasbourg, and chose the thorny path of a free writer. However, during the entire Strasbourg period of his life, the writer faced the prospect of a professional fiasco and a forced return to his hated father's house. The fear of repeating the fate of the biblical Prodigal Son was a constant companion of Lenz. So the protagonist of "The Englishman", Robert Hoth, was stuck in foreign lands for a long time at the beginning of the action and trembles at the thought that his father might forcibly bring him home. This thought terrifies him because he has fallen madly in love with the Turin princess Armida and longs to see her as often as possible — for this purpose, he even joined the local army secretly from his father. Meanwhile, his father has prepared a completely different fate for him: Lord Hoth dreams of seeing his son a member of the English parliament and marrying him profitably to the daughter of his friend, Lord Hamilton. As a result, in the "dramatic fantasy" there are not one, but two "fathers" of the main character: both equally take a lively part in the fate of the young man; both try to force him to act in accordance with their life attitudes, and not with his own. This prompts Robert Hoth to directly exclaim "Down with the fathers!" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 330]}. But, in addition, the "filial" rebellion includes rebellion against the most universal paternalistic figure — the Heavenly Father. The former disobedience of the author of "The Englishman" towards his immediate parent and the fear of inevitable punishment for this were intertwined in his soul with a sense of sin before God and the inevitable punishment from that side. Betrayal of theology was sometimes felt by Lenz as betrayal of God. The more acutely he realized the need to appeal to another divine authority: the place of the terrible, punishing and executing Judge, whom the stern Livonian pastor worshipped, in the thoughts of his wayward son, was increasingly occupied by a meek, merciful, forgiving God. The hero of The Englishman, instead of an inaccessible transcendent Father God, worships an equally inaccessible but immanent goddess. "The most terrible of beings, whose existence I have doubted for so long, which I denied to myself in consolation, I feel You! You, who placed my soul here, who is taking it back under your cruel power! Just don't forbid me to dare to think about her. A long, terrible eternity without her..." ^{[2, Bd. 1, S. 335]}. And the Confessor, who appears at the very end, trying to reconcile the agonizing Robert with the God of the fathers with the help of common truisms common to Christian sermons, hears in response: "Armida! Armida. — Keep your Heaven for yourself" ^{[2, Bd. 1, S. 337]}. This exclamation, which concludes the play, would seem to contradict Robert's statement in the first act: "Ah! I need to go up, because every person is looking for Heaven, because he cannot be satisfied on Earth" ^{[2, Bd. 1, S. 319]}. But "up" in the mouth of a young lover actually meant: to the window on the top floor of the palace, in which he longed to see the princess; at the same time, the hope for reciprocity on her part was realized by him as absolutely futile long before the finale.

Robert's love for Armida is unrequited and hopeless: there is an insurmountable social gap between them. And this is also quite an autobiographical motive: the beggar Lenz was more than once destined to fall head over heels in love with women who were obviously not of his circle, pillar rich noblewomen. So, immediately before writing The Englishman, Lenz experienced a deep and acute feeling for Henrietta von Waldner, with whom he was barely acquainted (like Robert Hoth with the Turin princess) and whom he endowed in absentia with all imaginable virtues and virtues (like Robert Hoth with the princess). Let us recall that the main conflict was built on the forbidden love affair between a representative and a representative of different classes back in Lenz's debut and most famous play of the Strasbourg period — "The Tutor", later it is clearly traced in his "Soldiers", and in the dramolet "Tantalus" it is all about the hopeless love of a mortal for a goddess. And although Lenz did not always dress his characters in burgher / noble clothes, a sense of social disadvantage and a thirst for emancipation, so characteristic of "Storm and Onslaught", lay at the heart of any unequal relations in the writer's works. "Thus, Lenz develops a typically Burgher conflict between father and son in the guise of the English and Piedmontese upper nobility. The son refuses to join the success society erected by his fathers. And the love conflict, which seems to be entirely placed in the inner world of the hero, is also paradoxically motivated by the gap between the estates, which, according to the experience of burghers, is insurmountable" ^{[4, S. 48]}. But never before has Lenz's passion for the "inferior" hero been so all-consuming and devoid of comic overtones as in "The Englishman". Robert Hoth is a monomaniac consumed by love passion, for whom nothing in the world, except the possession of a beloved, is of value. From the very first scene, the contours of the tragic denouement of the action of the "Englishman" are outlined — the suicide of the protagonist. Robert Hoth already realizes that he is doomed, and in every possible way conjures death. Already in the first act, he denounces himself as an alleged deserter, knowing well that this entails the death penalty. "Often, Princess, life is death, and death is the best life" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 322]}, he says to Armida, who promises him clemency. Interestingly, in Lenz's time, a morbid tendency to (sometimes gratuitous) suicide was often referred to as "English melancholia" ("melancholia anglica" [see: 5, S. 213]). Another of the characters of the "New Menoza" stated: "When I had finished my book (...), I would have acted like an Englishman and shot myself in the head" ^{[2, Bd. 1, S. 189]}. But that was, though gallows, but still humor, now the fatal intention is being carried out in earnest. Robert Hot's hot passion, doomed to be unsatisfied, simply cannot know any other way out. One of the pioneers of realism in German literature, Lenz in "The Englishman" deliberately changes the likeness of life and a sense of proportion, in some ways anticipating the sharp hyperbolicity and conditional schematicity of expressionism of the early twentieth century.

The language of Lenz's latest Strasbourg play, which is closest to the aesthetic canons of "Storm and Onslaught", is marked by off-scale expressiveness. The five-volume Russian "History of German Literature" says: "along with some naturalism of style and democratization of language, Sturmer literature is characterized by a pronounced pathos, a special, sometimes strained, expressiveness, tension and emotionality of syntax" ^{[6, p. 232]}. The style of Lenz, the playwright, of these features, as a rule, is characterized by "naturalism" and "democratization of language", the rest are fully manifested primarily in the dramas of F. M. Klinger. But Robert Hoth's monologues (which make up more than a quarter of the text of dramatic fantasy) are quite comparable to the violently affective, frenzied, grammatically incorrect speech outpourings of the protagonists of Klinger's Otto and Gemini. So, complaining already at the beginning of the play about his lot, Robert Hoth tries to express himself poetically and beautifully, but immediately gets lost in syntactic confusion: "Oh, how unhappy a man is! In all nature, everything follows its attraction, the hawk flies to its prey, the bee to its flower, the eagle to the sun itself... Man, only man… Who will forbid me to do this?" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 318]}. And here is an example of purely Sturmer affective rhetoric: "Ha, among all the tortures of life that human consideration can invent, I do not know more than to love and be ridiculed. And marble hearts make such mockery so easy for their consciences, because it costs them no effort, because it flatters their pride and imaginary wisdom so much, because it almost easily puts the worst sons of the Earth above the most worthy Son of God. Ha! They will no longer have to experience this joy" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 326]}. The double use of the exclamation "ha!" makes us recall the tragedies of the early Klinger, in which it was a kind of "trademark" [see: 7, p. 18]. This sarcastic "ha" from both sturmers, as a rule, expresses despair on the verge of hysteria. This is, in principle, almost the dominant emotion of the tragedies of "Storm and Onslaught", the hero of which, the declared "strong man" (Kraftmensch) always turns out to be infinitely weak and helpless in unequal confrontation with the structure of the world and society.

So Robert Hoth claims to be an autonomous "strong man", a "genius" who determines his own fate and is guided by the rules he created. As I. Stefan points out, "Robert Hoth is the hero of "Storm and Onslaught" par excellence, his last name is the program. He is hot, passionate, quick to make decisions, ready for the worst. In a certain sense, he is an intensified version of Goethe's Werther, whom he resembles in the most important character traits. Both characters are united by an oppositional attitude towards the Burgher society, amateurish art pursuits, fluctuations of feelings and idealization of lovers; both commit suicide in the finale" ^{[8, S. 16]}. Robert's constant dressing up in other people's clothes does not fit well with the image of a masculine "strong man", "sturmer", possessing a steel personal core: in the first act, he is forced to put on a musketeer uniform to guard his passion, in the second he appears as a prisoner, and even playing the violin, in the third he is dressed in carnival domino, in the fourth, pretends to be a savoyard organ grinder with a marmot on his shoulder, and finally, in the fifth, we see him in the pathetic underwear of a bedridden patient. It is not for nothing that Robert's self-certification opens the play: "I, poor Proteus" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 318]}. In this regard, the same I. Stefan stipulates: "As a creature of water, Proteus is a figure in opposition to Prometheus, the giver of fire, who was the central identification figure of the Storm and Onslaught and became, thanks to Goethe's hymn "Prometheus" written in 1772/74, a symbol of rebellion against traditional authorities. It can be assumed that Lenz quite consciously inscribes his Robert Hoth into the anti-Promethean tradition and, hinting at the water world associated with Proteus, recalls the element associated with the feminine principle. As a "sturmer" Hot Prometheus and Proteus in one person" ^{[8, S. 23]}. That is, the emphatically masculine, solar nature of "Storm and Onslaught" has its downside. Life forces "stormy geniuses" to resort to feminine gestures, the choice of an extremely shaky and shaky self-identity, the only one that allows the "genius nature" to at least temporarily gain ground underfoot in a hostile world.

Armida sees the feminine, "lunar", "watery" nature of her admirer. Feeling nothing but "pity" for him ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 320]}, she comments on his self-incrimination: "It seems that this man suffers from hidden melancholy, which pushes him to such impetuous decisions" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 321]}. By reducing the "genius nature" to a "melancholic", that is, a vulnerable, insecure person, the princess, on the one hand, radically devalues his claims, on the other hand, pronounces a word that largely determines the mental constitution of "stormy geniuses" and their heroes. In his fundamental work, written in 1968 and supplemented in 1985, the famous literary critic G. Mattenklott defends the thesis that melancholy was the main constituent element of the drama "Storm and Onslaught". The researcher emphasizes that it was not caused solely by social reasons. The melancholic nature of the Sturmers is largely connected with their aesthetic message, with the cult of indomitable fantasy, which distinguishes a true genius. "So, the heroes of The Tempest and Onslaught fail when confronted not with the reality of public life, but with its fiction, which is not only objective as an artistic representation, but also subjective in the sense of the truthfulness of what is displayed" ^{[9, S. 50]}. To illustrate this thesis, G. Mattenklott refers to the following passage from a letter from Lenz to I. K. Lavater, written shortly after the creation of The Englishman: "Give me more real torments so that I will not be broken by fictional torments. Oh, torment, torment, what are you! It's not comfort I need. Only this dumbness I cannot bear" ^{[2, Bd. 3, S. 456-457, cf.: 9, S. 52]}. And Robert Hoth chooses just "fictional torments", regardless of reality and lusting for the impossible.

Therefore, for the lords of the "fathers", Robert is generally only temporarily insane, subject to isolation and repressive treatment. They take all measures to ensure that the "patient" does not leave their supervision, up to tying him to the bed [see: 2, Bd. 1, S. 330]; they do not disdain "lies for salvation." For example, at some point it seems to them that the "patient" will be sobered by the news of Armida's imaginary marriage. They try in every possible way to appeal to his mind — the main value of the Orthodox Enlightenment revised by the "Storm and onslaught", seeing in it a universal panacea: "as soon as you come to your senses, you will be happy" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 325]}. It is not for nothing that H.G. Winter believes that "fathers" associate themselves with optimistic enlighteners in this point, who "reject melancholy because they see in it a deviation from behavior conditioned by reason" ^{[10, S. 75]}. In fact, the "sensible" explanations of Robert's behavior by the "fathers" are extremely poor and vulgar. They naively believe that the young lord is obsessed with a transient whim, amenable to the simplest methods of healing, such as bloodletting [see: 2, Bd. 1, S. 329]. "I still hope to find a time when Robert will laugh at himself." ^{[2, Bd. l, S.327]}, says Hamilton, who is more rude by nature, and calms the elder Hoth to the end by saying that "everything will settle down by itself" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 325]}. Thinking that Robert is "just" suffering from a sexual disorder, the "fathers" are seriously confident that successful mating with a seductive female will definitely solve all problems. Lord Hoth is more inclined to explain them by his son's hypersexuality and regrets "that he did not give him a companion when he left home" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 326]}, and Lord Hamilton, on the contrary, suspects the candidate for son-in-law of hyposexuality and sends him a dissolute charmer under the guise of a nurse, "who could I would like to seduce Anthony of Padua himself" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 326]}. But the imaginary mentally ill man does not succumb to her charms, behaves with her like a completely reasonable, coldly calculating person and, finally, cunningly begs for scissors from her, so that immediately, shaking the portrait of the one he idolizes, he cuts his throat. Thus, he "beats" stubborn rationalists on their own territory, but only in order to commit a highly irrational act.

Robert Hoth's powerful attraction to death shows the changed attitude of the pietistically educated Lenz to the problem of the permissibility of suicide. Previously, in his moralistic and theological writings, he categorically rejected it, but now he sees suicide as the only possible outcome for the alter ego he created. Old Lord Hoth explains his son's fatal decision by saying "that in childhood he came across certain books that inspired him with doubts about his religion" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 336]}. It is not explained which books they were, but it may very well be that a number of works by French enlighteners are meant, first of all, Holbach's "System of Nature", where it is clearly stated: "A person can love being only if he is happy. But if all nature denies him happiness, if everything around him becomes a burden to him, if thought paints him only sad, sad pictures, he has the right to leave a place where he finds no support for himself; he, in fact, no longer exists, hangs somewhere in the void and cannot be useful neither to myself nor to others" ^{[11, p. 303]}. However, for the materialist Holbach, "no support" implies the denial of the possibility of relying on God. "While the atheist Holbach consistently disputes the existence of such a being, Robert begins the process of conversion shortly before his death, as a result of which he again recognizes the existence of God" ^{[12, S. 26]} (note — infinitely distant and terrible). At the same time, Robert styles himself as a martyr, a sufferer in the name of the feminine deity he invented: "Yes, I really want to suffer, I want to be a sacrificed victim for the sake of her happiness" ^{[2, Bd. l, S.332]}.

H. Glarner notes that the plot of Lenz's last Strasbourg play is in many ways similar to the first, the most famous, the hero of which, due to the "paternal" prohibition on satisfying sexual desire, castrates himself: "The tutor and the Englishman in their acts of self-mutilation or self-destruction with fatal logic bring to an end what the Bergi brothers and both lords practice all the time according to in relation to them: difficulty and suppression of the development of an independent personality" ^{[4, S. 114]}. Thus, in Lenz's work there are recurring motifs associated with stable components of his worldview. In addition, in The Englishman, Lenz seems to foresee the course of his own impending illness. Pastor Oberlin, in whose house her most severe attacks were observed, reported how his guest fervently beat his head against the wall ^{[13, S. 476, cf.: 9, Bd. l, S. 330]} and tried to take his own life with scissors [see: 13, S. 474]. It is unlikely that the sick writer realized that he was imitating his hero. Rather, certain patterns of possible behavior have long been formed and entrenched in his extremely labile psyche. But besides his own insanity, Lenz predicted his parent's reaction to it. After all, Lord Hamilton's cynical remark about his failed son—in—law - "It is better to mourn his dead than to carry a madman everywhere with you" ^{[2, Bd. l, S. 336]} - anticipates the future words of the old honored pastor about his own son: "But if [God] in his eternal light provided that he would find peace and finding his place in this world is no longer possible, oh, it would be better if He gave him eternal rest through a blissful end. With what readiness, even if I shed a thousand paternal tears, I would sacrifice this Isaac to Him" [cit. according to: 14, S. 24].

It can be stated that, on the one hand, the whole complex of Lenz's individual problems, accumulated by the end of his stay in Strasbourg, was reflected in the small volume of the "Englishman": disappointment in the profession, fraught with the return of the "prodigal son" to the dominant earthly father; religious doubts, which gave rise to a growing sense of fear and guilt before the Heavenly Father; eternal love failures due to the inaccessibility and excessive idealization of objects of love; worsening melancholy and thoughts of suicide; finally, latent symptoms of future mental illness. On the other hand, the last Strasbourg play by one of the most prominent Sturmers absorbed many characteristic signs of the "Storm and Onslaught" as a whole: a decisive breaking of classical dramatic rules; increased emotionality, even affectation of the speech of the central characters; the cult of passionate love, not constrained by social institutions; rebellion against the wisdom of the "fathers" and religious dogmas; primacy feelings over reason; a combination of Promethean claims of a strong masculine personality with obviously feminine properties — mental lability and forced "proteic" mimicry under the conditions of the social environment. Since "Storm and Onslaught" is both a natural continuation of the general line of the European Enlightenment and an uncompromising polemic against it, the tragic character of the Sturmer ideology is clearly visible in "The Englishman": the emancipation of an autonomous, self—defining personality encounters its own boundaries, conditioned both socially and psychologically. In the conditions of feudal class society in Germany of the XVIII century. burghers-intellectuals, like their heroes, neglecting compromises, could not realize their ambitions in any way, and unrestrained feelings, as a rule, brought death to those who experienced them.

The small-sized "dramatic fantasy" in a concentrated form reflects the deep crisis that had emerged by 1776 in the work of its author and in the entire "Storm and Onslaught" movement. Almost all prominent Sturmer playwrights - Goethe, Klinger, Wagner, Leisewitz — either switch to a different aesthetic platform at this turn, or fall silent and give up literature; only the dramas of the young Schiller written a little later can be considered as the last outbreak of activity of the "Storm and Onslaught". Soon, the "stormy geniuses" become the property of literary history. Lenz, due to his weak psychological flexibility, is the least ready for this.